Sun Joins Graphics Chip Fracas

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Sun Joins Graphics Chip Fracas

Sun will be throwing itself into the graphics chip fray, fighting for the hotly contested attention of game and multimedia developers.

Sun Microsystems is making a play for the multimedia market with a new architecture called the MAJC Instruction Set Architecture. MAJC, pronounced "magic," will accelerate multimedia and communications applications written in C, C++, and Sun's Java programming language.

MAJC is a general-purpose architecture targeted at a number of different markets. That will be its advantage over graphics chips manufactured by competitors Nvidia and 3DFX, said Marge Breya, vice president of marketing for microelectronics at Sun.

"This architecture can run in three different crowds as opposed to one," she said. Sun is targeting the CPU, embedded/digital signal processing, and graphics markets with MAJC.

"Java is Sun’s main thrust right now," said Tom Halfhill, an analyst with Cahner’s MicroDesign Resources. "Anything that makes Java run faster is good for Sun. That to me is the underlying reason for why they are launching the new architecture."

Accelerated Java performance might also lure in game developers, who have shied away from Java due to performance concerns.

"Having a processor specifically tuned for Java may make it a more preferable choice for game developers," said David Wright, software development director for GameSpy Industries, which develops a launcher for 3D shoot-'em-ups like Quake.

"It has a lot of good features, and if there was a way to run Java quickly on commodity hardware, I think more developers would adopt it," Wright said.

The new chips will be introduced at the Hot Chips Conference at Stanford University later this month and discussed in-depth at the Microprocessor Forum in October. Sun expects to ship samples in the first half of 2000, according to Breya.

The MAJC architecture is different from Sun's previous MicroJava and PicoJava chips, which were specifically designed for running Java applications since they contained Java bytecode instructions.

3Dfx and Nvidia, who now have Sun to contend with as well as each other, are also busy preparing for their next round of feature enhancements.

3Dfx last week announced a new technology for its current and future chipsets called the T-Buffer. The T-Buffer adds new digital effects for improving the photorealism in 3D graphics. These features include full-screen anti-aliasing, which creates smoother graphics by removing jagged lines, and true depth of field for more realistic depth perception.

"It moves beyond the focus on speed to adding more features, and that’s something that graphics cards have not done," said Wright. "They’ve just focused on getting faster and faster. Now we’re seeing a focus on more features, which will have an impact on gaming. Once they are introduced, people will have a hard time going back to games that don’t have those features."

Nvidia also has high-powered graphics plans, as it prepares to introduce the successor to its highly popular TNT/TNT2 line of 3D chips, the NV10, later this summer. The main strength of the NV10 is expected to be geometry acceleration – for speedy mathematical calculations that render more realistic graphics.

The NV10 will have a first in graphics chips: a 0.18 micron design that allows it to run at much higher speeds than other graphics chips.